Industry news for the professional cartoonist
Adam@Home (AMS) is in an optimistic mood as 2024 has launched, though not quite as much in a hurry as his wife, who I suspect is only trying to encourage him, given that they’ve been married long enough to have a couple of kids on the brink of middle school. After all, encouraging him has…
(Banner by Johnny Walbridge, who, as noted yesterday, went on to be a Disney writer and animator.) We’ll start our look back at 1924 with a strip I didn’t know existed, possibly because it was only around for about three years. Ring Lardner was a popular writer and this was something of an extension of…
I’m trying to be more productive than the fellow in Matt’s cartoon, but there does seem to be a lot of letdown in the actual week we’re going through. I’m going to assume things will pick up along about the Eighth Day of Christmas. Which is Maids A-Milking and let’s hope we do better than…
Snoopy, Olive (Emi Burdge) & Popeye (Randy Milholland), Dilbert and Scott Adams, Noah Voelker, Jason Chatfield, and Thomas May. It’s Snoopy’s world, and Gen Z is just living in it – apparently. For months, social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram have been flooded with memes, clips and stills of Snoopy in action, clipped from…
I’m with Lizzie in Reply All (WPWG), with some mixed feelings about the holiday season but a large dose of “When is this over?” For the self-employed and empty-nested, the holidays are mostly days when the banks and the post office are closed, but, in addition, we’re entering a Dead Zone where a lot of…
The big news in Public Domain 2024 is selected Mickey Mouse copyrights, whose animated shorts Steamboat Willie and The Gallopin’ Gaucho were released in 1928, will finally succumb to The Mickey Mouse Protection Act. The Associated Press’ Andrew Dalton: With several asterisks, qualification and caveats, Mickey Mouse in his earliest form will be the leader…
Zits (KFS) made me smile Sunday. Note that it’s not a slam on the Nutcracker itself, and I like classic ballet. But the guys agree that the same ballet every Christmas gets stale, even as a tradition. My smile came because I’m retired and no longer have the yearly discussion of whether we will send…
First Dog on the Moon offers a look at the year ahead, and he’s lucky to draw the assignment, because you just sit back and wax omniscient knowing that, as he says, a year from now, nobody will remember what stupid things you predicted. People love predictions. I keep seeing a horoscope column come up…
Several comic strips have been anticipating Christmas with gags about kids trying to clean up their acts for Santa and people decorating their trees, but now we’re getting right down to the real nitty gritty, and Monty (AMS) brings up the topic of Christmas cards as we enter the home stretch. I used to get…
The best way to start today is with Paul Fell’s cartoon, which should please people who dislike sports. You don’t have to like sports, BTW, just like you don’t have to like opera or Shakespeare or raisin-oatmeal cookies. But there’s a difference between saying you don’t like ballet and wondering aloud why they don’t just…
Today’s Cornered (AMS) reminded me of my favorite Christmas tree. As I said the other day, I’ve stopped decorating now that I’m an empty-nester, but one Christmas when I had kids at home, one of my sons and I went to the hardware store to get rope so we could go buy a tree and…
Today will be a combination of the absurd and the frightening, so we’ll start somewhere in the middle with Graeme MacKay’s commentary on the price of Christmas trees. The scout troop in our town square is selling them for $65, about the same price as the local co-op, but I haven’t checked prices elsewhere because,…
Matt Davies Clay Jones By now you’ve heard that Time magazine has named Taylor Swift its Person of the Year, which I capitalize because they’ve managed to make it into a Big Freaking Deal despite a few damp squibs and obvious choices over the years. You can tell that Matt Davies has daughters, because he…
Might as well get my annual fruitcake rant out of the way. There will be a kabillion cartoons twixt now and Dec 25 about how awful fruitcake is, but in this Off The Mark (AMS), Mark Parisi gives us a close-up that explains the problem. Traditional fruitcake is a dense, dark loaf full of brown…
Red and Rover (AMS) Daddy’s Home — Creators Lola — AMS Yesterday’s comics page didn’t have a Juxtaposition so much as a three-strip pile up. One might suspect that all of the comic strip people live in the same town, but Red and Rover don’t even live in the same year as the others, being…